Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE:CHH) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Choice Hotels International, Inc. (NYSE:CHH) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 7, 2023

Choice Hotels International, Inc. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $1.82 EPS, expectations were $1.87.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Choice Hotels International’s Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. I will now turn the conference over to Allie Summers, Investor Relations, Senior Director for Choice Hotels.

Allie Summers: Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. Before we begin, we’d like to remind you that during this conference call, certain predictive or forward-looking statements will be used to assist you in understanding the company and its results. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated in forward-looking statements and you should consult the company’s Forms 10-Q, 10-K, and other SEC filings for information about important risk factors affecting the company that you should consider. These forward-looking statements speak as of today’s date, and we undertake no obligation to publicly update them to reflect subsequent events or circumstances. You can find a reconciliation of our non-GAAP financial measures referred to in our remarks as part of our third quarter 2023 earnings press release, which is posted on our website at choicehotels.com under the Investor Relations section.

This morning, Pat Pacious, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Scott Oaksmith, our Chief Financial Officer, will speak to our third quarter operating results and financial performance. Joining us also today for the Q&A portion of the call is Dom Dragisich, current Executive Vice President, Operations and Chief Global Brand Officer and former CFO. Following Pat and Scott’s remarks, we’ll be glad to take your questions. And with that, I’ll turn the call over to Pat.

Patrick Pacious: Thank you, Allie, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you taking the time to join us. I’m very pleased that Scott Oaksmith is joining us on our call today following his recent promotion to Chief Financial Officer. Scott has extensive experience across our finance division and he’s well known to all of you in the investment community, given his interactions over the years. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Scott for 18 years, and I’m confident he’s the ideal person to lead our financial strategy. His appointment demonstrates the depth of our bench and the importance of thoughtful succession planning. I’m also joined by Dom, who, as you know, served as our CFO for the past seven years, and recently stepped into a newly created operational role, where he leads our brand segments, franchise development, segment services, and corporate development.

Before I get into our quarterly results, I want to briefly discuss our proposal to acquire Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. We decided to make our offer public after six months of private negotiations that resulted in little progress. Our goal is to resume a constructive dialogue with Wyndham’s Board to make this combination a reality. We are confident that a combination with Wyndham represents compelling value for both companies’ shareholders, franchisees, associates, and guests. And we’ve heard positive feedback across these groups as well as from third parties. For Choice shareholders, our proposal provides significant financial and strategic benefits. Wyndham shareholders would receive a substantial premium and immediate value for their shares.

And both sets of shareholders would have the opportunity to participate in the significant value creation that we believe a combined company would unlock. To put this in simple and direct terms, we are interested in combining with Wyndham because we respect their business, and we see it as highly complementary to what we have built. Together, we believe we can accelerate and build upon what each company could do on its own. With an asset-light, fee-for-service model, we are confident that the combined company would generate stronger free cash flow and profitability and have the financial strength to accelerate growth, quickly delever, and enhanced returns to our combined shareholders. For franchisees, combining our companies would nearly double the resources available to $1.2 billion of spend on marketing and reservation activities, drive more direct revenue to their hotels with an even stronger rewards program and lower their operating costs.

As such, we see an even brighter future for the combined companies. We also see a clear path to completion, and we’re ready to move expeditiously to negotiate terms, including ways to provide market standard protections for Wyndham shareholders. Importantly, while this transaction remains important, and highly valuable for us to pursue, we remain laser-focused and committed to executing daily on our business and enhancing the value of Choice as evidenced by our strong third quarter results. Now let’s turn to our quarterly results. Our distinct growth strategy and best-in-class franchising business engine, drove our adjusted EBITDA to record levels in the quarter. And I’m also pleased to say that we raised the midpoint of our full year guidance, which represents a 12.3% increase in our adjusted EBITDA for the full year.

We expect to build on this strong momentum through the rest of the year as we grow our franchise business with hotels that generate higher royalties per unit, while leveraging the investments we have made in our systems to improve our franchisees’ profitability. This impressive growth is fueled by the successful execution of our key strategies, which are unique to Choice. These strategies include: executing the nearly completed rapid integration of Radisson Americas, which has already realized synergies 5% above our original plan and ahead of schedule; driving organic growth of our brand portfolio and the quality of earnings with hotels that generate higher than brand average royalties per unit; investing in our brands designed to appeal to the guest of tomorrow, while providing a compelling return on investment for our franchisees; increasing the velocity of hotel openings through our best-in-class hotel conversion capability; further bolstering our platform capabilities through strategic partnerships and other ancillary revenue opportunities; and expanding our international growth where we doubled our EBITDA contribution in the quarter.

Let me start with the successful acquisition of the Radisson Americas brands. When we executed this transaction, we made it clear that the Radisson Americas portfolio would be effectively integrated and contribute to our results in a timely manner. The successful integration process is tracking well ahead of schedule towards completion. Importantly, what our integration teams have accomplished with Radisson Americas further validates our capabilities to replicate this great success with the Wyndham combination. The Radisson Americas acquisition has created a step function change in the size of our business, expanded our rewards program, extended our co-brand credit card opportunity, increased our geographic reach in the Americas region, and opened up new incremental earnings streams.

Thanks to our integration expertise, and strategic investments in our state-of-the-art proprietary technologies, we have achieved $84 million in annual recurring synergies, exceeding our prior target by 5%, and we now anticipate additional future costs and revenue synergies. In the third quarter, we integrated the digital channels and rewards programs, all within less than a year of acquisition. We are now delivering improved business performance to the Radisson Americas hotels as the process of onboarding these hotels on to our best-in-class business delivery engine is well underway. At the same time, we have been able to help our Radisson Americas franchise owners reduce reliance on third-party distribution channels. And as a result of our improved hotel footprint, we have recently negotiated improved terms for not only the Radisson Americas owners, but the whole Choice system with one of the major third-party distributors.

This, in turn, has helped lower the overall operating cost for our franchisees, which is so critical in a time of rising labor costs and interest rates. Across the entire portfolio of brands, our franchisees and guests are reaping substantial benefits since the digital integration. Specifically, we are driving stronger performance for the Radisson Americas brands with bookings on our digital platform increasing by over 20%, given the higher traffic and booking conversion rate on the Choice website and mobile apps. This, in turn, lowers customer acquisition costs for franchisees. And following the integration of the rewards programs, we now have 63 million Choice Privileges members who book directly with our franchisees, pay them higher rates, and return more often than non-members, which all translates again to lower customer acquisition costs and higher margins for our franchisees.

The entire Choice system now has access to over 1,600 nationally and globally managed corporate accounts and specialty accounts and over 28,000 small to medium business accounts from which we now can provide incremental revenue growth as we move ahead. Radisson Americas properties are also enjoying access to our hotel profitability tools and Choice University, the most widely awarded learning program in the hospitality industry. As of today, at a pace faster than anticipated, we have seamlessly and effectively migrated 75% of Radisson Americas hotels onto our property management system, and we expect the remaining properties to be onboarded by the end of the year. With the full integration moving towards closure, we expect to help further drive Radisson Americas hotels’ topline performance and reduce their operating costs to bring their profitability to the next level as they leverage the power of Choice’s systems and tools.

The excitement generated by the Radisson Americas business unit is underlined by its performance. In the third quarter, the Radisson upscale brand RevPAR grew over 6% year-over-year, outperforming the upscale segment by 3 percentage points and achieving RevPAR index share gains versus competitors. Our future growth is now enhanced by the addition of the Radisson Americas brands to our best-in-class business delivery engine, and we believe we can provide similar benefits to Wyndham franchisees if a transaction can be consummated. Our selective organic unit growth strategy is also delivering results and enhancing the attractiveness of our brands. Over the last five years, we have expanded the reach of our franchise business in more revenue intense segments.

The new franchises in these segments are more accretive to our earnings and are another key driver of our future growth. In fact, year-to-date through September, new hotels we added within a brand generated an average of 20% higher royalty revenue than hotels exiting the brand. We are also executing new hotel openings at an impressive pace. Through September, we averaged more than four openings per week. This resulted in a 24% increase in openings year-over-year with 159 domestic hotel openings. At the same time, brand equity is elevating as we are seeing improved guest satisfaction scores and are enhancing our brand’s value proposition to consumers. We also continue to invest in our business. Our recent brand investments are designed to appeal to the guests of tomorrow, while providing a compelling return on investment for our franchisees.

And these investments are already gaining traction. Our first new Comfort prototype hotel opened this quarter and marks the next chapter for our flagship brand which continues to attract significant developer demand with 136 projects in the pipeline. In addition, earlier this year we debuted the next-generation Sleep Inn prototype, and a Country Inn & Suites room refresh. And our newest extended stay brand, Everhome Suites, is gaining meaningful traction across the development community with over 60 domestic projects in the pipeline, including 12 under construction. Fueling our success is our commitment to strengthening the value proposition we provide to our franchise owners. In fact, over the past decade, we have tripled the number of rewards program members and raised the direct booking contribution to our franchisees by 50%.

In the current hotel development environment, our more diverse and strengthened brand portfolio makes our core competency, a best-in-class hotel conversion capability even more impactful. Specifically, in the third quarter, we drove a 27% increase in our global rooms pipeline growth for conversion hotels quarter-over-quarter and 11% year-over-year. We expect nearly 70 additional domestic conversion projects to open by year’s end. In addition, 72% of the domestic agreements awarded in the first nine months of the year were for conversion hotels. We are especially pleased with the prospects for our Radisson upscale conversion brand given it generates, on average, 6 times more royalty revenue than our economy portfolio. Through our superior speed-to-market conversion processes and best-in-class franchisee support, we are able to move projects quickly through the pipeline.

In fact, the velocity of our conversion openings has been so high that some conversion hotels never appeared in our quarterly reported pipeline numbers. Of all the domestic franchise agreements we executed for conversion hotels in the first nine months of this year, two-thirds have already opened or are expected to open by the end of this year. And we expect our brand portfolio conversion activity to remain robust for the foreseeable future. We are also encouraged by the traction we are gaining in our efforts to expand our platform business and ancillary revenue growth opportunities. One example we’re very pleased with is the new co-brand credit card. This strategic partnership should be a long-term tailwind, given that it continues to drive loyalty to our brands as our rewards members with credit cards stay with us, on average, 4 times as often as non-rewards members.

On the international front, another exciting development benefiting our customers is a new strategic partnership with one of the largest hotel operators in Mexico which is known for its portfolio of upscale, upper upscale, luxury hotels, and resorts in Mexico and the Caribbean. The arrangement will grow our international portfolio and is expected to enhance Choice Hotels’ rewards program by allowing our members to earn and redeem points at these award-winning all-inclusive properties. Beyond this strategic partnership, we also continue to improve our international business performance. Our international portfolio-wide third quarter RevPAR increased 14%, with the Americas region growing 25% compared to the same period of 2019. We believe we have a significant opportunity to further gain international market share and realize additional EBITDA growth in the coming years.

The results we achieved in the third quarter confirmed the effectiveness of our deliberate approach to growing our company with hotels that generate higher royalties per unit. We remain confident in our versatile, asset-light, fee-based model, which has proven its ability to generate multiple avenues of earnings growth throughout various economic environments. As we look ahead, we are well-positioned to build on the success we achieved in this quarter and our powerful earnings algorithm and speed of execution will enable us to further capitalize on growth opportunities in 2023 and beyond. I will now turn the call over to our CFO. Scott?

Scott Oaksmith: Thanks, Pat, and good morning, everyone. I’m excited to be joining you on the call today and continue to build upon the strong partnership we have developed over the last 18 years. I also look forward to working closely with Dom in his new role to drive our key financial objectives focused on maximizing long-term shareholder value. Today, I’d like to provide additional insights on our third quarter enterprise and segment results, update you on our balance sheet and capital allocation approach, and share expectations as we move ahead. Throughout my remarks today, I would like to note that all figures are inclusive of the Radisson Americas portfolio and excludes certain one-time items, including Radisson Americas’ integration costs, which impacted the third quarter reported results.

For third quarter 2023 compared to the same period of 2022, revenues, excluding reimbursable revenue from franchised and managed properties increased nearly 9% to $219.6 million. Our adjusted EBITDA grew 12% to $155.9 million. This was driven by strong effective royalty rate growth, organic growth in more revenue intense segments and markets, the successful integration of the Radisson Americas portfolio, and the robust performance of our platform, procurement, and international businesses. And our adjusted earnings per share were $1.82, an increase of 17%. Let me turn to our key revenue levers, which include our unit growth, royalty rate, and RevPAR performance. In terms of unit growth, our portfolio’s absolute size and the royalty revenue per hotel are key advantages.

Our strategic goal has been to accelerate quality room growth in more revenue intense segments and markets by simultaneously growing our effective royalty rates, which ultimately results in an outsized increase in royalties. In addition to our mix shift strategy for the broader portfolio, we are driving more revenue intensity at the individual hotel and brand level across the system. In fact, year-to-date through September, new hotels we added within a brand continued to generate an average of 20% higher royalty revenue than hotels exiting the brand. Our domestic system size of the more revenue intense upscale, extended stay, and mid-scale segments for Choice’s legacy portfolio grew by 1.6% for units and 1.9% for rooms year-over-year. At the same time, both units and rooms in our international portfolio increased approximately 1% year-over-year.

We are particularly pleased with the growth of our international rooms pipeline, which nearly doubled in the third quarter year-over-year. During the quarter, we also leveraged our best-in-class conversion capability, as we expanded our global rooms pipeline for conversion hotels by 27% since the last quarter. These results demonstrate that the deliberate decisions and strategic investments we have made and will continue to make in our value proposition, franchisee tools, brand portfolio, and platform capabilities are contributing strong returns across all our segments. First, we strengthened our upscale franchise business. For the first nine months of 2023, we grew our domestic upscale units by 11% year-over-year, highlighted by a 50% increase in the number of new hotel openings.

Second, we accelerated our growth in the extended stay segment. For the first nine months of 2023 we grew our domestic extended stay unit system size by 13% year-over-year, highlighted by a 38% increase in the number of new hotel openings. At the same time, we grew our domestic extended state conversions room pipeline by 36% year-over-year. We remain very optimistic about our extended stay franchise business growth and expect the number of our extended stay units to increase an average annual growth rate of more than 15% over the next five years. Third, we continue to invest in our mid-scale portfolio. And as of the end of the third quarter, we reached over 4,300 domestic hotels. In fact, after executing a franchise agreement, our mid-scale properties open their doors as royalty-generating hotels in just under 100 days on average.

And fourth, our economy segment transient hotels are continuing to benefit from the improved value proposition. As a result, in this segment, year-to-date through September, new hotels we added continue to generate an average of 20% higher royalty revenue than hotels exiting. Our effective royalty rate also continues to be a significant source of revenue growth. Our domestic system effective royalty rate for the first nine months of 2023 increased 6 basis points year-over-year, representing $4.4 million of incremental royalties, including a 6 basis point increase for the Choice legacy brands to 5.1%. The third revenue lever I will discuss is our RevPAR performance. Our third quarter RevPAR increased 12.1% in the same quarter of 2019, including 13.7% growth from the Choice legacy portfolio.

RevPAR was down 80 basis points year-over-year in the quarter, reflecting tougher year-over-year comps as we were the first hotel company to return to and significantly exceed pre-pandemic RevPAR levels. While we expected softness in the lower mid-scale and economy chain scales in the back half of this year, we are optimistic about RevPAR growth prospects for the coming year given the favorable long-term business and leisure trends and the initiatives we put in place to capitalize on these tailwinds. As Pat mentioned, we continue to build on the strong momentum of our platform business. Specifically, in the third quarter, we increased our platform and procurement services fees by 8% to $15.5 million compared to the same period of last year.

We believe that we can drive this strong revenue growth in years ahead as we increase the number of products and services we offer to nearly 7,500 hotels, millions of guests, and other travel partners, while expanding our platform. At the same time, as a result of our strong organic growth and the acquisition of Radisson Americas, we doubled the EBITDA contribution of our international portfolio in the quarter. I’d like to now turn to our well-positioned low leverage balance sheet, marked by gross debt to EBITDA of 2.7 times, which continues to be below the low end of our target range of 3 times to 4 times. Year-to-date through October, we returned over $390 million to shareholders. This included nearly $57 million in cash dividends and $335 million in share repurchases.

Over the past year alone, we have repurchased nearly 8% of our outstanding shares and returned over $0.5 billion to shareholders. With our strong cash flow and debt capacity, we are well positioned to continue accretively growing the company. Our strong capital structure positions us well to increase investments to further expand the scale of our business to drive franchisee and shareholder value. It can also effectively support the acquisition and successful integration of Wyndham. Beyond our focus on continued organic earnings growth and the large strategic opportunities we have discussed, we will continue to make targeted investments in our business to drive growth focused on hotels that generate higher royalties per unit, further enhance the franchise owners value proposition while expanding our international and platform business.

I’d like to turn to our expectations for the remainder of the year. For full year 2023, we are raising the midpoint of our adjusted EBITDA guidance to $537.5 million, which represents 12.3% growth at the midpoint year-over-year and approximately 44% growth compared to the full year 2019. From a full year perspective, when assuming a like-for-like portfolio, our organic adjusted EBITDA, excluding Radisson Americas is expected to grow an impressive 8.4% over the prior year. For full year 2023, we are also raising our adjusted diluted earnings per share to range between $5.95 and $6.03 per share. Underlying our outlook are the following assumptions for full year 2023. We are updating our expectations for domestic RevPAR to be approximately 1% year-over-year, which builds on the approximately 13% growth relative to 2019.

We expect domestic system growth of the more revenue-intensive segments to be in line with our prior guidance of approximately 1%. And finally, we are maintaining our outlook for full year 2023 effective royalty rate to grow in the mid-single digits year-over-year. As we look into 2024, we continue to expect to generate adjusted EBITDA growth of approximately 10% year-over-year, driven by incremental contribution from Radisson Americas as well as organic growth in more revenue intense segments and markets, strong effective royalty rate growth, and other factors. This outlook does not account for any additional M&A activity. Today’s results are a testament that our strategy is working, and we intend to keep investing in those areas of our business that will generate the highest return on our capital.

At this time, Pat and I would be happy to answer any questions. Operator?

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And your first question will be from Shaun Kelley at Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Shaun Kelley: Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. And Scott, congrats on the promotion. I’d love to lead off, Pat, with the sort of, I think, very obvious high level question of sort of what are the next steps here for Wyndham. So, as we see it, obviously, you’ve taken your offer public. Is the next step, a possible proxy battle? How would you think about directly buying shares in Wyndham? Is that an opportunity for you? Or is there a way to address maybe some of the very specific concerns that they put out in their detailed response, including maybe willing to move above what I think you deemed as market standard protections? Would you be willing to go above that to get conversations to kind of further evolve here? Thank you.

Patrick Pacious: Yes. Thanks, Shaun. I appreciate it. I think the top priority as we’ve been talking to our shareholders, their shareholders, our franchisees, their franchisees, the top priority is to get re-engagement to come back to the table. Every issue that’s been identified can be solved by coming back to the table and negotiating. But these are two great companies. We think combined, we would be even better positioned to deliver this incredible value to stakeholders. I think as you are all aware, we are very committed to this transaction. We’ve been evaluating this over the last 10 months. There’s a lot of value to be created here. And the strategic rationale is just simply too compelling not to see it all the way through.

As far as seeing if there’s additional value to be unlocked, there can be additional value to be unlocked if Wyndham re-engages. I think as you mentioned, the – some of these questions around how to protect the risk allocation, we’re well advised and we’re confident in our ability to complete this in a reasonable timeframe. We are willing to offer transaction terms as we stated to them when we were talking privately that provide the appropriate level of risk mitigation and certainty for their shareholders. So a lot of these conversations are things that we want to continue to engage Wyndham on, but we’re going to do that with them privately. But we’re well advised, we’re well aware of what our options are to see this all the way through, and we’re confident we’ll get the transaction completed.

Michael Bellisario: Thanks. And just to be very clear, if we kind of stay in this agree to disagree, because again, you want them back to the table, but they’ve been, I think, pretty clear on some sort of economic move probably needs to occur for them to do so. So, I mean, again, could you give us any sense of the options of what that could entail to push that along? And again, hopefully, I think in all terms to turn this conversation friendly, would you budge on uneconomic terms here to help, I guess, return them to the table? Is that on the table for you?

Patrick Pacious: Well, you’re not going to be surprised, Shaun. I’m not going to have that conversation on this call, but we’re happy to have that conversation with the Wyndham Board.

Shaun Kelley: Sure. Thank you very much.

Operator: Thank you. Next question will be from Stephen Grambling of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Stephen Grambling: Hi, thanks. So I’m just going to follow-up on Shaun’s question with maybe a little bit more direct of a question. Just how do you think about the right level of termination fee and/or willingness to put a collar in place? Are there any comparable transactions that you look at?

Patrick Pacious: Yes. Thanks, Stephen. I mean, obviously, when you look at an opportunity like this, we’ve looked at what market terms look like for deals of all different sizes and shapes. A lot of it comes down to how each site is evaluating the execution risk. One of the benefits of bringing the public – the proposal public three weeks ago, is we’ve been able to engage in pretty extensive conversations with our franchisees, many of whom are their franchisees. I would say in the last three weeks, we’ve probably spoken to hundreds of franchisees across the spectrum. They are very supportive of the combination. These are sophisticated investors themselves, and they immediately grasp how a combination like this is going to improve their profitability.

They see more direct bookings, they see a larger rewards programs, and they understand how that can drive down their costs and improve their profitability. So understanding the sort of execution risk around getting a deal like this completed. The last three weeks, I think, have been really supportive from the input we’ve heard from franchisees, from shareholders, and from third parties on seeing a transaction like this happened. So I think when you look at evaluating that, the last three weeks have really helped us understand what it’s going to take. I mean, effectively, we’re looking for the opportunity to have sufficient time to get through the required approvals to make this transaction occur. And I think, as you said, have we looked at market terms, yes, we have.

We understand what those are, and we’re certainly willing to engage in those conversations with the Wyndham Board.

Stephen Grambling: And maybe two quick follow-ups. One, have you then had conversations with the FTC or how would you frame the path there? And an unrelated M&A question, how do we think about licensing fees that you’ve earned from Bluegreen and the impact from the HGV transaction?

Dominic Dragisich: Yes. Let me talk about the HGV transaction. We are well aware of their transaction. We’ve been in discussions with them. I think it’s important for investors to understand that there is a change in control provision in the existing Bluegreen agreement. And we provided a lot of benefit to that entity over the past. I think it’s probably a dozen years, I think – close to a dozen years, we’ve had a great working relationship with Bluegreen. And we would expect that’s going to continue on the – when HGV takes control as well. So we’re looking forward to those conversations and creating more value. As far as engaging with regulators, it’s too early in the process, but it is something we’ve obviously looked at. We’ve been studying this, as I said, for about 10 months, and we feel very confident that there’s a clear path to completion to get this transaction through the required approvals.

Stephen Grambling: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Next question will be from Michael Bellisario at Baird. Please go ahead.

Michael Bellisario: Thanks. Good morning, everyone.

Patrick Pacious: Good morning.

Scott Oaksmith: Hi, Michael.

Michael Bellisario: Just one more question. First on the topic of Wyndham. I think you mentioned or you said if Wyndham re-engages, I mean you obviously have to re-engage too, it takes both sides to do a deal. So I guess my question is sort of how long do you let the process go in the public realm before you either say, enough is enough, and we’re going to go do something different or we’re going to walk away from the deal? Just trying to understand the thought process about how long it hangs out in the public market in the public realm? Thanks.